Akira Kurosawa’s modern crime masterpiece takes the leap to 4K. It’s a kidnapping tale in a context of social friction — the perpetrator is maddened by the gap between haves and have nots. A superb detective story balances that irony with the commitment of an ethical businessman and a police force we wish we had here. Toshiro Mifune is sensational, as are Tatsuya Nakadai, Yutaka Sada, Takashi Shimura, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Hiroshi Unayama and Tsutomu Yamazaki. The excellent music is by Masaru Sato. It’s in original 4-track stereo, as well.

High and Low
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 24
1963 / Color / 2:39 widescreen / 143 min. / Tengoku to Jigoku / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date September 2, 2025 / 49.95
Starring: Toshiro Mifune, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yutaka Sada, Takashi Shimura, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Hiroshi Unayama, Tsutomu Yamazaki, Susumu Fujita, Kenjiro Ishiyama, Kyoko Kagawa, Takeshi Kato, Isao Kimura, Tatsuya Mihashi.
Cinematography: Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saito
Production Designer: Yoshiro Muraki
Film Editor: Akira Kurosawa
Costume Design: Miyuki Suzuki
Music Composer: Masaru Sato
Screenplay by Eijiro Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni
from the novel King’s Ransom by Evan Hunter
Produced by Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa, Tomoyuki Tanaka
Directed by Akira Kurosawa

High on the list of World Classics is Akira Kurosawa’s engrossing contemporary (1963) story that bridges the gap between East and West. High and Low uses an unorthodox structure for a crime tale constructed as distinct movements, like a symphony. Its style ranges from sordid realism to stylized scenes that encourage contemplation. Its profundity is something we don’t expect from a police thriller by source author Evan Hunter, even though he also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s  The Birds.

The hardboiled crime classic High and Low (literally: Heaven and Hell) is one of Akira Kurosawa’s most entertaining pictures. Toshiro Mifune once again creates an unforgettable character, a powerful but decent executive pitted against company sharks as ruthless as those in Kurosawa’s previous film,  The Bad Sleep Well. The movie uses screen space to create a psychological effect. We spend most of the first forty minutes stuck in the same house awaiting ransom phone calls from a formidable kidnapper. But a cut to a sleek bullet train announces the beginning of an exciting police manhunt covering an entire city.

The story begins with a tense business meeting in an upscale home overlooking Yokohama, as children play cowboy and outlaw with cap pistols. Hard-working up-from-the-factory shoe executive Kingo Gondo (Toshiro Mifune) is directing a careful takeover of his firm, a maneuver that requires fast moves with company shares and a large chunk of hard cash. When his small son is kidnapped, Gondo becomes frantic and agrees to pay the ransom … only to find that the kidnapper Ginjiro Takeuchi (Tsutomu Yamakazi) has in error snatched the son of his chauffeur, Aaoki (Yutaka Sada). A few words from his wife Reiko (Kyoko Kagawa) and Gondo knows what he must do. Decency demands that he use his buyout money to free the servant’s child as if it were his own.

A small army of detectives are assigned to the case, an investigation that starts with few if any clues. The police work out of Gondo’s house to monitor phone calls. As the kidnapper appears to be able to see into the glass house from afar, they must crawl on the floor to stay hidden. Chief Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai) motivates his men by stressing Gondo’s business sacrifice. Impressed, the squad redoubles its effort, mounting a vigorous campaign to catch the kidnapper.

Adapted from an American crime novel, Kurosawa’s film emphasizes dynamic social and spacial contrasts. Stranded in his lavish house, Gondo paces and worries, waiting for news from the kidnapper Takeuchi, who has acted out of bitter despair for the inequities between rich and poor. Takeuchi is an educated professional, but economics force him to live in stinking, crowded slum housing. All the while he regards Gondo’s white house on the hill — the heaven he seeks to destroy. Takeuchi is a rebellious angel, committing crimes and murdering out of a warped hatred of society.

It is therefore ironic that the kidnapper’s chosen victim, although rich, is not the despised capitalist he imagines. Kingo Gondo is at heart a shoemaker dedicated to creating a superior product. He demonstrates his commitment to quality by tearing apart a committee’s proposed shoe model to show its shoddy construction, a gesture familiar from  American films honoring business ethics.  When the detectives need to hide a smoke bomb in the valise that will carry the ransom payment, Gondo goes right to work, spreading his old leather-working tools across the floor of his soon-to-be repossessed living room.

Will Takeuchi succeed in bringing down the man on the hill?  By taking an ethical path, Kingo Gondo may lose his business position, his house and all of his possessions. He will have given up all hope of company ownership to save a little boy not his own.

The chase to capture the kidnapper finds new ironies. Feeling terribly indebted to his employer, chauffeur Aaoki causes complications as the detectives close in on their target. Takeuchi becomes infuriated by the sympathy given Kingo Gondo by the press. In blind retaliation he commits himself to additional horrors, as if addicted to his own degradation. An extended sequence takes place in Yokohama’s harrowing back-alley drug world. The stylized drug nightmare is far more explicit than depictions in American films of 1963.

Kurosawa’s film is a high-budget Toho production. Location shooting ranges all over Yokohama, making us feel as if we know the Japanese costal city like our own. An impressive downtown set, all glass and showcases, is populated with hundreds of extras. Foreign sailors were recruited to represent an American presence, loitering with the local good-time girls and rocking out to the blaring bands. Takeuchi is pursued through several levels of hell: indifferent hospital waiting rooms, downtown streets, nightclubs, the drug alleys … and finally to an isolated Enoshima cottage on a garden hill over the ocean. It’s as remote a Last Stop as the death shack in the film noir  Criss Cross. Both seem to exist at the End of the Earth.

Every scene is good but the best are inspiring. Kurosawa depicts an almost Utopian spirit of cooperation between the Japanese police and media outlets. Chief Detective Tokura informs the press of his entire strategy and asks for their cooperation on a scheme to fool the kidnapper. Forty reporters agree, and not one of them exploits the situation, something unthinkable today. Kurosawa again demonstrates his ease with his large and memorable cast. Among the detectives is Detective ‘Bos’un’ Taguchi, played by Kenjiro Ishiyama, a bald stage actor who had trouble performing on film. Kurosawa liked the actor so much that he slowed down production to accommodate his inexperience.

High and Low was the first time many of us Yankees had seen a Japanese bullet train in motion. Kingo Gondo must toss the ransom from an express speeding at over 100 miles per hour. It’s the film’s most docu-real sequence, filmed on a moving train in real time, with seven cameras and dozens of extras working in close confinement with the nervous Mifune. When one of the cameras jammed, a second 100-mph pass had to be rigged from scratch. To get a clear view of the kidnapper from the moving train, Kurosawa had a roof removed from a garage near the tracks.

Clever plotting and editing create other tense suspense moments. At one point Gondo and Takeuchi are within a few feet of one another on the city street. In another sequence, two cars prowl slowly through the hills, just missing one another, making for a different kind of low-key suspense. An audio recording reveals a telling clue, a situation identical to one in Joseph M. Newman’s 1950  711 Ocean Drive.

On the conceptual level, High and Low echoes the sentiment expressed in Joseph Losey’s  These Are the Damned, about ‘the new age of senseless violence.’ In socially-conscious terms, even so-called meaningless violence comes from easily defined causes. With cold logic telling him that he must live in Hell while others have palaces on the hill, Takeuchi fixes his mind on a revenge that evens the score in his favor. Injustice has given him the role of Demon, and it takes an enormous effort by society to neutralize his evil.

When social realities deny enough people a dignified existence, they’ll strike out in unpredictable ways. Higher up in the pecking order of affluence, a decent and ethical man like Kingo Gondo is likewise made vulnerable: at the first sign of weakness his peer competitors will circle for the kill. Takeuchi shares with Gondo a determination not to compromise, not to be humiliated. But it is the mediocre, profit-focused executives that band together to suppress Gondo, and lower the standards of life for everyone.

Dynamic imagery underscores the ironies of social inequality. Takeuchi thinks in terms of symbols, but the film gives us the feeling of real conflicts in action. There is little or no preaching or message-making. The exciting High and Low is an excellent starter film for viewers unfamiliar with Japanese cinema.

The harrowing finale opts for another kind of stylization: Takeuchi and Gondo face-off across a wire screen in a prison visiting room. The stark image is graphic simplicity at its best, expressing the social theme in just a glance. A reflection in a sheet of glass superimposes kidnapper over victim, suggesting that their souls are equal even if they themselves are polar opposites. Not since  I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang had a crime film ended with such an inhuman shriek, like the sound of a damned soul.

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of High and Low is a welcome addition to the company’s line of Akira Kurosawa classics. It follows a 2001 DVD, a 2008 DVD remaster, and a 2011 Blu-ray that was of good but not outstanding quality. Made from the original negative, this new digital restoration corrects previous issues. It also features the original 4.0 stereophonic track from 1963. The sound mix is additionally sensitive. We focus our ears to study the ‘city sounds’ that provide a big clue for the detectives. We’re also impressed when Gondo opens his sliding glass door, admitting the sounds of the city and harbor below.

We also wonder about the optics in the Tohoscope lenses. The many scenes in Kingo Gondo’s modern house emphasize unbroken straight lines both horizontal and vertical. We’re accustomed to seeing minor distortion in every anamorphic lens system, but all the lines here are rigorously straight. Is it just because Kurosawa can get away with using longer lenses?

The encoding retains the ‘added color’ overlay for a shot at the midway point, where signal smoke is seen rising from a factory smokestack. We noted this effect in a 1999 DVD Savant article,  Color Experiments, along with other ‘isolated color’ effects in older movies.

Disc producer Abbey Lustgarten has been shepherding this title since 2008. She repeats her excellent added value video material, which appears on the second Blu-ray disc. The leading item is a better-than-average making-of docu from a 2003 Japanese TV show. Kurosawa went to extravagant lengths to achieve realism, including using several different sets for Gondo’s house ( I wonder if it was to accommodate his longer lenses. ). In daylight scenes we look out the glass doors and see the real Yokohama below; for night scenes of the view beyond the picture windows, a large on-stage miniature set was built, the kind seen in some of Toho’s fantasy pictures. We wonder if the same miniature cityscape was re-used in other Toho features, like the same year’s  Matango.

Interestingly, the Japanese TV show seems to think that the film’s drug hell sequence is unrealistic, weak; they apparently didn’t see it as stylized, theatrical. High and Low shifts from docu realism to a kind of unearthly delirium, accompanied by a wailing theme from composer Masaru Sato.

Toshiro Mifune is seen on a talk show, being chatty with a respectful hostess who kids him about his reputation for extreme cleanliness. Actor Tsutomu Yamazaki remembers wearing those mirrored sunglasses, and being given careful direction by Kurosawa.

Composer Sato collaborated with Akira Kurosawa as far back as 1955’s  I Live in Fear and is celebrated for his quirky music for  Yojimbo. His themes for High and Low illuminate the dogged police investigation, and stay out of the way during action scenes. The weird wail that accompanies the opening Tohoscope logo always reminds us of the opening of Roger Corman’s  “X”. They’re from the same year, so it seems unlikely that composer Les Baxter could have seen High and Low first.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

High and Low
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent 4.0 stereophonic surround
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Stephen Prince
Making-of documentary, Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create
Interviews with Toshiro Mifune and Tsutomu Yamazaki
Trailers and teaser
30-page insert booklet with an essay by Geoffrey O’Brien and an on-set account by Donald Richie.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: September 22, 2025
(7397high)

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